Читать книгу One Man's Dark - Maurice Manning - Страница 10

CHAPEL ON THE WAY TO HOBO TOWN

One summer Belcher’s machine shop

over by the railroad tracks

blew up and burned to the ground.

It was a long, low, shambling place

and round — it looked like a feed trough

turned upside down with a square front

and the name over a sliding door

with corrugated metal siding;

the whole thing had been silver once.

The morning after it burned we rode

our bikes over there to watch the smoke

uncoil and disappear. I suppose

we were amazed by such destruction,

how sudden it could be and how

the shop no longer had a form.

We figured Lonnie Belcher, a boy

we knew from school though he was older,

would become a hero for being close

to all of this — his grandfather

and a strange, unsteady uncle ran

the shop. Lonnie had been the one

who’d told us about Hobo Town,

which was a few miles down the tracks

and farther down a spur that ran

a ways and ended in the woods.

It was decided, then, that since

we’d seen the blown-up shop and that

had made us brave, we might as well

continue on to Hobo Town.

In single file we clattered down

the tracks; there were three or four of us,

our wheels rattled over the ties,

the smell of creosote and pitch

was thick and every little while

we’d stop and listen to the rails

to see if there was any singing.

Beyond the brief freight-yard, we came

to a shack that one time might have been

for a switchman. We looked in the doorway and saw

a dirty magazine that was torn

in pieces, but a page had been hung

on a nail in the plank wall — it was strange

to see her there, a decoration,

but she, the woman on the page,

was someone’s favorite; she’d been chosen,

her image was elevated, and now

with sunlight on her, the altar shone.

Faith is difficult to define,

but most of us are willing to say

something we don’t quite know must come before

ourselves, something

that isn’t our idea yet

we hold it higher up and think

it is the symbol of a secret.

We found the overgrown spur

and followed it a little distance

until we reached a bridge over

a stream and there we stopped. We could see

the beginning of the woods and hills,

and a twist of smoke from a fire rose up

and trickled into the hot sky.

Again we were amazed and afraid,

though no one spoke it; but now I see

there must be fear, there must be strange

unsteady fear in faith. The hoboes

were over there. Their presence, like that

of God or lust or even grief,

had drawn us out in wonder, but then,

in shame, we’d trembled and turned away,

and that, I think, is also part

of faith, its imperfection.